


they could have found it in your eye

by syllic



Category: Gattaca (1997)
Genre: Epistolary, Fix-It, Friendship, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 12:28:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllic/pseuds/syllic





	they could have found it in your eye

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reishiin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reishiin/gifts).



 

Jerome goes to flip the switch, and nothing happens.

He has to endure the undignified wrangle of pulling himself up over the incinerator edge and then crawling back to his chair; he's strong, stronger than he'd been before Vincent had come into his (their) life and made the notion of cardiovascular health regain its value. But manoeuvring himself back into the chair is still a struggle. It had taken something to slide out of it a few minutes earlier, something greater than what he had thought it would, when heʼd let himself imagine it. It hadn’t been like the car, closing his eyes and stepping into nothingness, chest empty and mind full of one desperate thought racing after another. It had almost felt like the opposite, in fact—an interminable journey across the smooth grain of the wood, with the vestiges of a shared artificial life, neatly wrapped in plastic, looming over him from out the corner of his eye as he strained. The only thought he’d managed was a kind of slow countdown: three more pushes against the floor, then two, then one before he could stretch to touch the first step.

The distance back to the chair seems shorter, somehow, but again he finds that it takes something significant, something beyond the physical, to slither back up its smooth edges: to empty his coat pockets of stones and walk himself out of the river.

He sits for a minute; perhaps for ten. He’s not entirely certain. When he finally wheels his way to the electrical panel thereʼs a single piece of paper affixed to it. One line of neat, crabbed writing. Jerome lifts the paper, not allowing his eyes to focus; underneath it, the screen shows that the power control for the incinerator has been slid all the way to “off”.

He looks down, and after a beat of what must be shocked incredulity he realises that the note does actually say: _Get the fuck over yourself, Jerome._

A short, sharp bark of a laugh escapes him, the sort of sound one of his ex-girlfriends had always called “uncouth”, twisting her lips in disapproval as Jerome poured another glass of port. Lizzie, her name had been. A slip of a girl, mostly too kind to understand why anyone two months away from an Olympic medal would be as angry as Jerome was, all the time. He hadn’t been fair to her. Had she ever said—

 _Get the fuck over yourself, Jerome_ , the note continues to read when Jerome glances down, almost involuntarily.  

(Not even the comforting distance of a “Eugene”.)

But suddenly, just like that— suddenly, without a divine choir or a cleansing rush of tears or the sound of lightning striking in the vicinity… suddenly, just like that, Jerome does.

What months of binge-drinking, what a (very) brief period of time shouting insults in a psychoanalyst’s office, what years of quasi-sobriety, of uncomfortable companionship, of painful reminiscences tugging at the centre of his chest like heavy anchors tangled in slick, dark seaweed—what all of those accumulated moments had not been able to undo, a secondʼs glance at Vincentʼs handwriting does.

“Get over yourself,” Jerome mouths almost-silently, trying to fix the shape of it in his mouth.

He slides the power control to the right position; he wheels his way back the way he came. He finds the store of large incineration bags that Vincent had always kept around, as if any day might be the day he had to burn away the evidence not of excess cells but of an entire body.

He wheels himself about with a kind of manic delight, placing his store of carefully collected samples haphazardly into the bags. He can’t imagine he’ll ever think to drag himself back into the incinerator—one look at its walls closing in on him was probably enough—but burning this unimaginable store of shit canʼt hurt. As he piles the bags into the dimly lit, stifling space of the furnace he sees them for the guarantee that they are: Jerome hopes he wonʼt change his mind, but once he does this, he canʼt. Not for months. He canʼt leave Vincent without the things he needs.

He shrugs off his jacket, awkwardly, and then lifts the collar to wedge the ribbon of the fucking silver medal under it, draping it over the shapeless form of what used to be his favourite suit.

He wheels himself as close as he can to the door of the incinerator, and he reaches around the steps to place the jacket over the bags and the vials and the genetic debris of the worst thought he ever had, which had a moment ago seemed like the best.

He runs his hand over the medal, and smooths a wrinkle away on the fabric of the jacket.

He presses a thumb to the door, and watches as the flame lights, catches, burns.

 

* * *

 

 

When he and Anton were kids, over the years here and there Vincent had heard someone or another comment on his brother’s ungracious nature. They hadn’t called it that, of course—maybe they liked to think that ungraciousness was bred out of valids—but Vincent had heard what they meant, anyway.

 _That poor Vincent_ , someone would whisper. _If only that brother of his..._

They meant to say, of course, that they thought Anton unkind for not holding back for Vincent, who couldn't ever hope to catch up. They thought Anton unkind, but Vincent knows—and he’d known then—that it had been a kind of generosity on his brother’s part: not the rubbing it in Vincent’s face, but the being willing to treat Vincent as the kind of competitor who could be taken at face value. Not automatically a victim.  Someone who could take a little shit.

(Sometimes after Anton had outrun him out outswam him (or out-healthed him for that long stretch in the second grade, and every day after that) Vincent would catch his brother looking at him with a different look in his eyes: wondering, covetous, curious about and horrified by and afraid of Vincent’s vulnerability.)

The truth is, Vincent knows, that he’s the lesser sibling in all kinds of ways.  For all he'd like the story to be different, to fit some neat moral fable: it doesn't.  Vincent has never been lesser in intelligence, in abilities, maybe not even in kind-heartedness—but where Anton was always willing to look around and really _see_ Vincent, since Vincent first saw a streak in the sky after a launch, he’s never been able to see anything else. Anyone else.

In the heart-stopping moment when it had seemed as if Lamar held Vincent’s dream in his hands, one second away from wringing its neck: even in that moment, Vincent realises in retrospect, he had been unable to hear. To see. Lamar had been telling him all along, and even when it could have saved him—“I’ve never told you about my son”, Lamar had told him, complete with everything but an exaggerated wink and music in a swelling major key to mark that Vincent would be okay, after all—Vincent had been too busy focusing on himself to see.

The steps to the transport seem endless: he only walks smoothly out of long practice, as a result of every time he had strolled out of the room when his heart had felt as if it were about to burst out of his chest, the imagined sound of Jerome’s _thud-thud-thud_ beat the only thing keeping him upright. He walks smoothly, but his steps feel as shaky as the first breaths of air he had taken inside Gattaca, convinced he would be discovered between one expansion of his lungs and the next.

Vincent finds a seat; he straps in; he wills his blood pressure back to normal.

He thinks about not seeing Lamar—never seeing him at all—and then his mind flashes briefly to the memory of rows and rows of blood and piss and hair and eyelashes plucked away from the eyes in which they belonged and he thinks: thank god he saw those things for what they were. Thank god he knew to leave some sign that he had seen.

He wishes viscerally—perhaps not more ferociously than he has wished for the stars of his life, but at least as much as he has longed for them in the sharpest moments—that Jerome will choose to listen.

As soon as he thinks that he remembers. He feels the edges of Jerome’s letter in his pocket, and he pulls it out: one lock of hair, stark against the thick, white paper; overleaf, a note in Jerome’s loopy script.

 _Make sure you look up_ , it says. **_Actually_ **_look._

It doesn’t say _don’t get so caught up in the pleasure of the victory and the accumulated bitterness of years of swimming against the current that you forget to actually enjoy this thing that’s kept you alive all this time, asshole_.

It doesn’t say that, but Vincent can see it anyway.

  

* * *

 

When Vincent gets back, limbs weak and atrophied from lack of gravity, Irene is waiting. Her beautiful, ridiculous car glints in the sunlight, and they drive down a quiet, smooth road, through the quieter desert.

“I’m sorry,” Vincent says.

She shrugs, expressively, one elegant shoulder lifting and then lowering, and Vincent reads the elegance of the gesture as if it were writing printed neatly in a book. She forgives him; she won’t let him off the hook. The kind of complex negotiation that a woman like Irene has performed all of her life.

Not like Jerome, born into success and ease and then tortured by the feeling that something _more_ was out there, and then, in an instant, making it impossible for himself to keep searching—choosing to tell himself a story of his life as if a bright blue sky had faded abruptly into an abyss.  Not like Vincent, denied passage and advancement from birth and given clarity of purpose, of thought, as a result, even as he became blind to so many things worth seeing.

She’s worked all her life to tell a story in the grey area between hopes and disappointments, and Vincent and Jerome—Vincent thinks neither of them have ever thought that way.  Never compromised, for all of their elaborate performance of meeting each other halfway in the too-narrow space of a single's man's life: never, except in that moment of goodbye.

 _Get over yourself_ , Vincent remembers writing.

And every morning, vessel-time, before doing anything else, reading: _Make sure you look up.  Actually look._

He almost doesn’t dare to ask—he can’t bear to hear that the answer is not what he wants—but Irene doesn’t make him.

“He’ll be waiting when we get there,” she says.

She smiles, a barely perceptible twitch of her lips, and Vincent leans back into his seat and settles in for the ride.  

The landscape rushes past them, a blur against the scratchiness of Vincent's eyes; he closes them, and feels (incomprehensibly, given the place from which he has just returned) as if he is heading to a land more unknown than the vast blackness of the sky beyond earth.


End file.
